With their availability in hardcover, 50 Shades will complete an almost entirely reversed traditional publishing cycle. The books started out as Twilight fan fiction posted online. A tiny Australian publisher then released them as ebooks and print-on-demand paperbacks, selling about 250,000 copies. Random House snapped up the rights in a seven-figure deal, rereleased the ebooks and made 50 Shades widely available in paperback for the first time — where it achieved stratospheric success. Finally, a little under a year later, the books will be released in their most expensive format: The hardcover list price is $26.95 per book, USA Today reports (though that will surely be slashed by retailers like Amazon and there will be a three-book bundle for $80.85.

Random House Doubleday publisher Anne Messitte told USA Today that readers had asked for the hardcover editions and that these books will be “the ultimate collector’s editions.” Each book has a ribbon for marking its place and an embossed author’s signature on the cover — not high-end enhancements, but a way to make the books somewhat special while keeping them at a standard hardcover price.

The 50 Shades publishing cycle could prove a model for self-published romance titles that became popular as ebooks and are then bought by traditional publishers. Until now, such books have been released only in paperback editions, with the assumption that fans who might have bought the self-published books for just a couple of dollars would be reluctant to pay much more in print. If the 50 Shades hardcovers are a success, though, publishers might feel emboldened to consider hardcover editions of more originally self-published titles. 50 Shades hasn’t just turned the notion of what can be a bestseller on its head — it might show that readers’ ideas of what is “worth” a collectible or hardcover edition have shifted as well.

In October, Publishing Perspectives editor-in-chief Ed Nawotka wrote a story that’s stuck with me. “What Author Could Possibly Need a Publisher?” appeared in Publishing Perspectives’ Frankfurt Book Fair daily (PDF). The story was about 50 Shades of Grey, the erotic trilogy by E.L. James that began its life as Twilight fan fiction and was then published by a small Australian publisher before being snapped up by Random House’s Vintage in a seven-figure deal and widely distributed. Nawotka wrote:

“Simply put, amid the continuing economic recession, the publishing industry needed Fifty Shades of Grey. James didn’t need a publisher as such, but once she turned to the pros, her relatively modest success was turned into a maelstrom of money. And, for 2012 at least, put bestsellers — and one might argue, the publishing industry itself — back in the black.”

Four of the authors on Amazon’s 2012 adult top-ten list — which counts Kindle and print copies together — either originally self-published their books or published through very small publishers. Here they are, including the traditional publishers they signed with:

1. Fifty Shades Freed: Book Three of the Fifty Shades Trilogy by E. L. James (first released in January 2012 by The Writer’s Coffee Shop; acquired by Random House in March 2012)

3. Fifty Shades Trilogy: Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, Fifty Shades Freed 3-volume Boxed Set by E. L. James (Random House)

4. Bared to You: A Crossfire Novel by Sylvia Day (ebook self-published on April 3, 2012; acquired by Penguin in May 2012)

6. The Marriage Bargain by Jennifer Probst (ebook first released by Entangled Publishing on February 14, 2012; acquired by Simon & Schuster in August 2012)

7. Reflected in You: A Crossfire Novel by Sylvia Day (the second book in the trilogy, published by Penguin on October 3, 2012)

In a statement, Sara Nelson, Amazon’s director of books and Kindle, said it’s “interesting to note that four of the five contemporary romance titles in the top 10 list, including the Fifty Shades trilogy, were originally independently published and went on to become huge best sellers.” That’s true but leaves out what happened between the books being independently published and becoming huge bestsellers: A traditional publisher entered the scene.

I don’t want to downplay the success of these titles before they were traditionally published and distributed in print. 50 Shades, Bared to You and The Marriage Bargain all hit the New York Times ebook bestseller list before being acquired by big publishers. The 50 Shades trilogy had sold 250,000 copies, mostly as ebooks, before it was bought by Random House; The Marriage Bargain sold over 150,000 copies as an ebook in its first three months of publication, before it was bought by Simon & Schuster. But the books either weren’t in print or were only available via print-on-demand. In June, Sylvia Day told BookPage:

The biggest and most obvious advantage to traditional publishing is the print run and distribution for Bared to You. There’s no way I would’ve come anywhere near 500,000 print copies, nor would Bared have ever been found in Walmart, Target, Costco, BJs, Kroger, etc. as a self-published book.

The remaining five books on Amazon’s list were traditionally published. There are no solely self-published titles on the list.

Self-publishing on a larger stage

Not surprisingly, bestselling erotic trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, which started out as Twilight fan fiction, got a lot of attention at Frankfurt as a self-publishing success that became even more successful once it was picked up by Random House. The trilogy is rumored to have sold over 50 million copies, but James couldn’t have done that on her own, writes Publishing Perspectives editor-in-chief Ed Nawotka: “It took Random House and Bertelsmann’s global network–and editorial, production, distribution and sales expertise–to make that happen.” He cites 50 Shades as a prime example of how self-pubbed authors and traditional publishers can work together: “Amid the continuing economic recession, the publishing industry needed 50 Shades of Grey. James didn’t need a publisher as such, but once she turned to the pros, her relatively modest success was turned into a maelstrom of money.”

At Frankfurt, publishers were on the lookout for more self-published titles to snap up. Penguin bought the UK rights to crime novel Natural Causes by James Oswald, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies as a self-published book, in a six-figure deal; German publisher Goldman Verlag also made a six-figure deal for the title, and offers were in from Brazil and Italy.

Amazon continued its promotion of its self-publishing platform KDP. The company held daily sessions about the benefits of using self-publishing through KDP, and also announced that it is expanding the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library — which lets Amazon Prime members who own Kindle devices borrow one ebook a month from a library of over 200,000 titles, most of them self-published — to the UK, Germany and France.

In order to offer their books in the KOLL, self-published authors must make them available exclusively through the Kindle store.This is “dangerous…for the ebook rivals who have yet to open their doors to self-published content,” Eoin Purcell writes. “In reality, only Kobo has a fully functional platform for self-publishing authors beyond the USA (Apple does too, but only to the extent that those who have a nice Mac can access their iBookstore, but not everyone has a Mac). Nook’s [self-publishing platform PubIt!] is US only, though the talk is that this will change soon. The longer B&N and Microsoft exclude non-U.S. citizens from the service, the longer Amazon has to lock in exclusive content for three months at a time.”

Speaking of Kobo, the company announced a few more initiatives to compete on the self-publishing front through its self-publishing platform Writing Life. It acquired French digital software company Aquafadas and will make iBooks Author-like tools available to users. Writing Life is available in new languages — German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch — and the company said authors from 82 countries are now using it.

Three bookselling startups to watch

Three of the most-talked-about startups at the Frankfurt Book Fair focus at least in part on new ways of selling books. Ganxy lets authors and publishers create “showcases” to sell books and control marketing and promotions. They can ssell books directly through the showcase or simply provide links to retailers. The entire showcase can then be tweeted, embedded in a blog, website or Facebook page, or can stand alone as a website.”

BookShout! lets users import ebooks they’ve purchased from Barnes & Noble and Amazon into its app. Once BookShout! has verified the purchases, users can access a DRM-protected version of the file uploaded by the publisher.

BookShout! is already working with Random House, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Wiley, but the practice of providing a third-party site with your Amazon user name and password is causing controversy: As Baldar Bjarnason writes at FutureBook, “We don’t know nearly enough for us to decide whether we can trust Bookshout. If they use their own servers as a proxy for the process, then those machines become a prime target for hackers. Compromising them would give them instant access to a host of Amazon accounts and their associated credit cards.”

BookShout! founder Jacob Illian addressed some of the concerns in a comment on paidContent’s story, writing, “At BookShout, we do not store your Amazon or B&N password when you import your books. In fact, if you import your books, buy another book from Amazon and then want to import the new one, you have to enter it all over again.”

ZolaBooks, founded by former literary agent Joe Regal, will begin selling ebooks by the end of this month, Regal said at the Tools of Change Frankfurt conference. “We intend to have every book from every publisher,” Regal said. Most books sold on Zola are protected with the company’s “proprietary” DRM — that was a requirement of the big-six publishers Zola is working with — which Regal claims is “unbreakable.” And, he said, “our answer to competing with Amazon is not to compete with Amazon…Our value system is so completely different from theirs.” He claimed “they’re not fundamentally editorially driven. [Amazon, which is publishing its own print and ebooks, might disagree.] They are pure commerce…Their value is price.”

Going global, thinking mobile

As digital reading expands globally, it won’t look the way it has in the West. In particular, mobile phones could be key in less wealthy countries, but many of those opportunities are so far untapped. ”I’ve been perplexed by the relative lack of interest for books on mobile,” Andrew Bud of the Mobile Entertainment Forum told Publishing Perspectives. “Yes, it’s a harder sale, but as the traditional products that do well on mobile–ringtones, for example–are fading, there is an opportunity for publishers to become a stronger part of this morphing market.”

Ebooks are already selling well on mobile phones in China. At the International Rights Directors Meeting on Tuesday, Gary Tan, owner of the Grayhawk Agency in Taipei, offered a brief overview of China’s mobile ebook market. China has over one billion cell phone users and 300 million smartphone users as of March 2012 and China Mobile, one of two major telecom providers in China, is the country’s largest ebook platform. Publishers may be reluctant to sell foreign rights to China Mobile, as it takes a huge cut of sales — at least 50 percent and sometimes as much as 70 percent — and sells the ebooks at a 90 percent discount from the print price. “These terms sound really bad,” Tan said, but China Mobile has such a large user base that if a book becomes a bestseller on the platform, “we might be talking about six-figure U.S. revenue.”

A panel on potential for ebooks in sub-Saharan Africa also focused on mobile. Ben Williams, a South African bookseller and founder of Avusa Digital Books, a platform for African ebooks, mentioned mobile payments company M-PESA as “one of the most sophisticated banking services you can have in Africa” and said digital bookstores could be built on top of it. He also cited initiatives like Paperight, which rely on photocopying machines in “the copy shops that are all over Africa” to print out copies of ebooks. (There’s advertising on the paper’s margins.” “The copy shop is now like a library or bookstore,” Williams said. Nevertheless, Togo’s Yasmîn Zahra Issaka-Coubageat, publisher of Graines de Pensées, noted that only “thirty percent of the population has a mobile phone in Togo,” and so for many countries even a mobile phone revolution could be a few years away.

Globe, bookshelf photos courtesy of the Frankfurt Book Fair

Amazon announced it was selling more ebooks than print books in the U.S. in May 2011 — 105 ebooks for every 100 print books. “We hit this milestone in the US less than four years after introducing Kindle,” Jorrit Van der Meulen, VP of Kindle EU says in the release, “so to reach this landmark after just two years in the UK is remarkable and shows how quickly UK readers are embracing Kindle.”

Free Kindle books are excluded, but “if included would make the number even higher.” The Kindle UK store includes nearly 1.4 million ebooks.

A couple other facts from the release, which heavily promotes Amazon’s ebook self-publishing service KDP:

• Amazon says that UK Kindle readers buy four times more books than they did before owning a Kindle.
• E.L. James, author of the “50 Shades of Grey” trilogy, is “the #1 bestselling author of all time at Amazon.co.uk, eclipsing JK Rowling’s total sales.” She sold over two million Kindle books at Amazon UK in four months.

In May, UK bookstore chain Waterstones partnered with Amazon to sell Kindle e-readers in its nearly 300 stores.

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated Amazon UK’s ebook-print book ratio. I apologize for the error.

This week’s featured title

The book: “The Marriage Bargain” by Jennifer Probst (Entangled, $2.99). “The Marriage Bargain” is #11 on the New York Times e-book bestseller list this week, and #20 on the USA today list.

Copies of “The Marriage Bargain” sold: 152,668

What it’s about: A bookstore owner casts a love spell to save her home. When a billionaire offers her a marriage in name only, she accepts, but neither bargained for love.

How it hit the bestseller list: Probst, the author of several erotic and contemporary romance titles, built up her presence on social media months before the book was published in February. She did a 20-stop blog tour in early 2012 to promote the book. Entangled bought a Goodreads ad and “steady positive reviews began to trickle in from various outlets.”

A sequel, “The Marriage Trap,” comes out in June, with a third book in the series, “The Marriage Mistake,” due in the fall.

“The Marriage Bargain” on … Amazon |Barnes & Noble | Kobo

New York Times bestseller list, week of 5/13/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 5/3/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

Vintage paid seven figures to republish E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey trilogy, which was first published in book form last year by a small Australian publisher. Before that, the trilogy appeared in a slightly different form, under the title Master of the Universe, on fan fiction site FF.net.

Sarah Weinman at Publishers Marketplace reported yesterday (subscription required) that Vintage publisher Anne Messitte called 50 Shades of Grey and Master of the Universe “two distinctly separate pieces of work.”

Today Jane Litte, who runs the popular romance blog “Dear Author,” compares 50 Shades of Grey to Master of the Universe using a variety of Internet tools, and finds that the works are quite similar — 89 percent the same, according to plagiarism-detection tool TurnItIn.

“With the success of Alternate Universe fan fiction and the successful leveraging of that fandom into seven-figure economic rewards, the influx of fan fiction into professional publishing is likely to begin at greater levels than previous,” Litte writes. She says it’s important to state a book’s provenance: “It’s an indicator to readers that they may have encountered this before and it gives the fandom that propelled the author to success a nod. At the very least it’s courteous. At the most, it’s truthful advertising.” She’ll be running a series of posts on fan fiction and copyright, and I’m looking forward to reading them.

The fact that 50 Shades of Grey is extremely similar to Master of the Universe, a work that was previously free online, is not the only issue here. To me, the fact that Master of the Universe was once free and available isn’t that problematic: Many people who are reading the book now would never have encountered it in its previous form online; there’s value in packaging something into a print or e-book (people still pay for print copies of Pride and Prejudice even though that’s a public-domain work free in its entirety on the Internet); and honestly, if a publisher can get readers to pay, more power to ‘em.

For me, one question is: How similar is 50 Shades of Grey to Twilight (not very unless Twilight contains a major bondage and sadomasochism element that I missed)? All sorts of works take inspiration from other works — everything from the movie Clueless (based on Jane Austen’s Emma) to books like Wide Sargasso Sea and The Hours. (Twilight is a lot more recent than Jane Eyre and Mrs. Dalloway, of course — its author is still alive and writing — and that makes things a little more complicated.)

More importantly, as more fan fiction gets monetized in book form, will other copyright issues arise? At “Dear Author,” commenter Merrian writes, “What we risk missing is considering and building some consensus about what is fair use and what is the ethical way of going about using fan fiction outside the realms of creating and making it because work that arises in fandom’s often has a collaborative and shared conception.”

50 Shades of Grey is the first title in a trilogy by British author E. L. James. This morning, the NYT reports (in what is currently the most-emailed article on the site) that the book has “electrified women across the country, who have spread the word like gospel on Facebook pages, at school functions and in spin classes…conversation about the book online has fed many of the sales.” Over 250,000 copies have been sold.

Though the NYT mentions the “word-of-mouth excitement” the trilogy has generated and says James “began the trilogy by posting fan fiction online,” the article doesn’t explain its origins in detail. Well-known romance blogs like “Dear Author” and “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books” have been covering 50 Shades of Grey since last year. 50 Shades of Grey is hugely popular on social reading site GoodReads, where it was a finalist for “Best Romance” in the 2011 GoodReads Choice Awards. There, it has been rated 6,821 times (with an average star rating of 4.34) and reviewed 1,347 times.

The trilogy was published last year by a small Australian company, Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House. Random House’s Vintage announced today that it paid seven figures for the print and digital rights to the trilogy at auction. The Random House e-book will be available Monday, and a 750,000-copy print run of a redesigned paperback edition will follow. (You can buy the e-book on Kindle and Nook for $9.99 now, but it is still the Writer’s Coffee Shop edition, though the publisher is listed on Amazon as Random House.)

“Dear Author” founder Jane Litte explains the trilogy’s origins:

It was originally published along with the two sequels, Fifty Shades of Darker and Fifty Shades of Freed, in its entirety, as Master of the Universe on ff.net, a site that hosts what is known as fan fiction. Master of the Universe reimagined the Bella and Edward love affair set in contemporary Seattle, Washington with Bella as the young college graduate virgin and Edward as the masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections. This collection of submissions has since been deleted.

She also notes “During the height of its popularity, an auction for the series raised $30,000. The author appeared on a fan fiction panel at the 2010 ComicCon and attended a three day conference in DC thrown by her fans.”

And at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Sarah Wendell explains why she thinks the book became so popular:

It has a secrecy element, for example, similar to some paranormal romances and their avid fanbases. It’s also not at all surprising that 50 Shades and Twilight share a few plot themes, specifically that secrecy and the temptation inherent in the world of both narratives, and the alpha male who is opulently, ridiculously wealthy, Volvos optional. Plus, Edward, as I wrote a few years ago, and in many similar ways (again, surprise surprise) Christian are both very much old-skool-style romance heroes. 50 Shades (and Twilight, obviously) are also told from the heroine’s POV, a very deep, first person, detail-heavy point of view, and the narrative is also akin to reading a diary, adding to that sense of illicit secrecy.

But the point of divergence between them is that secret — and this is not to say that at this point 50 Shades become a wholly original piece of fiction. It is not, considering how much of the character types are based on Stephenie Meyer’s work….

Ultimately, I think 50 Shades is popular because of the combination of elements and the foundation it “borrows” from Twilight, among them the very mysterious and barely glimpsed alpha-male point of view, and the presence of a very innocent heroine being inducted into a secret, sexually charged environment. Moreover, the scarcity of paper copies and the absorbing qualities some readers find in the story, as well as their own reactions and desire to share the recommendation with others in an exclusive environment, contribute to the increasing coverage.